"HPC has a fundamental role in driving innovation, leading
to societal impact through better solutions for societal challenges and increased
industrial competitiveness," says Glinos. "It's not just about exascale
hardware and systems, but about the computer science needed to have a new generation
of ICT."

"Only very few applications using HPC really take
advantage of current petaFLOPS systems," he adds. "New computational
methods and algorithms must be developed, and new applications must be
reprogrammed in radically new ways." In addition, Glinos highlighted the importance of public procurement
of commercial systems for developing the next generation of IT infrastructures,
which you can read more about in the recent iSGTW
article ‘Golden
opportunities for e-infrastructures at the EGI Community Forum’.

Finally, he spoke about the
conclusions of the recent EU council for competitiveness: "HPC is an
important asset for the EU... and the council acknowledges the very good achievements
of PRACE over the years." For Horizon 2020, Glinos says: "We want to
build on PRACE's achievements to advance further integration and
sustainability." He argues for the importance of an EU-level policy in HPC
addressing the entire HPC ecosystem, saying that the sum of national efforts is
not enough – "we need to exchange and share priorities."

The
conclusions of the EU council for competitiveness were also highlighted by Sergi
Girona, chair of the PRACE board of directors. "We have to work together
because we want to support science and industry, the development of HPC in Europe,
and the development and training of persons," he says.

During his talk, Girona also gave an overview of PRACE in numbers:
with its 25 member countries, PRACE has a budget of €530m for 2010-2015,
including €70m of funding from the European Union. Girona explains that PRACE has
now awarded more than 5 billion computation hours since 2010 and is currently providing
resources of nearly 15 petaflops.

However, he emphasises that PRACE is about much more than simply
providing access to HPC resources. "We don't just want to give access to
computing resources; we want to support users at all stages – it is key to
train people," he says. "We have
created six training centres in Europe and have approved a curriculum with
71 PRACE advanced training centre courses for this year."

The importance of training was also highlighted by Glinos: "We
need more expertise, so we intend to support a limited number of centres of
excellence. Topics may relate to scientific or industrial domains, such as
climate modelling or cancer research for example, or they may be 'horizontal',
addressing wider challenges which exist in HPC. These centres of excellence
need to be led by the needs of the users and the application owners."

Following Girona's talk, Wolfgang Eckhart of the Technical University of Munich, Germany, gave
a presentation on his research in the field of molecular dynamics. He and his colleagues
have been selected as winners of the PRACE ISC Award for their paper entitled '591
TFLOPS Multi-Trillion Particles Simulation on SuperMUC'. The award ceremony is set
to take place later today.

The remainder of the conference consisted of a series of exciting
presentations on research conducted using PRACE resources, ranging from high-resolution
global climate models to molecular simulation, and from astrophysics to better understanding
the building blocks of matter. You can read more about these on the PRACE Scientific
Conference website, here.

Be sure to check back later
this week for further updates from ISC'13.